Dept. 7 Adv. Class Update: Hollowpoint Monk

The rebels were strong and furious young China men, righteous and assured of the correctness of their cause, who had dedicated their lives to the study of martial arts. Their bodies were as hard as jade, and as supple as a bamboo reed; their fists were in harmony with their goals.

On the other side of the battlefield: scared, bigoted white men with guns.

The white men won the war.

Easily.

It was a lesson repeated when the well armed Chinese army rolled into Tibet and ended the world. At Hiroshima and Nagasaki, another lesson, delivered by the white man’s weapons. The lesson hammered home again in Vietnam: the Viet Cong fought the white men to a standstill, purely through skill and savagery, but at the cost of a country scorched to bare earth, and a generation mutilated.

The lesson was as simple as it was brutal: purity of spirit, enlightenment, mastery of the mind and body meant less than nothing against 60 rounds a minute on full auto fire.

Over the decades, in hidden monasteries and back alley dojos, in terrorist training camps and military police academies across the East, a radically new martial arts style took shape. The new style crossed barriers of country, race and technique. The asterism of Tibetan monks was combined with the feats of iron will practiced by Pakistani yogis, blended in a stew of Japanese weapon-styles, Chinese hand to hand and firearms training similar to that used by Western SWAT experts.

When John Woo and the Wachowski brothers started making movies about samurai gunslingers, graceful and lethal with twin SMGs, that influence went in the pot, too.

The Hollowpoint Monk style is as fast moving and deadly as a bullet, and like a round striking a target, the swiftly changing style is constantly deformed and ricocheted by its practice.

The mockingly named “Hollowpoint Monk” is a modern martial artist who draws equally from the old and the new: Zen koans first uttered by the Buddha, meditations handed down from one seeker to another for centuries, Mossad combat shooting techniques, action movie cool and quotes are all equally valuable sources of inspiration for these unconventional, adaptable martial artists.

A Hollowpoint Monk is not a recognized martial artist; they are official members of no dojo, usually forbidden from fighting on any recognized circuit. Few seek the spiritual side of the martial arts, and most learn just enough to be deadly. Hollowpoint Monks are practical and lethal, and most have been fighters their entire lives. Most of these new-school warriors are gangsters, cops and former soldiers. Prospective Hollowpoint Monks have lived with violence their entire lives, and have learned a secret technique that only improves their ability to survive. Some are traditional monks who abandoned the traditional path for a chance to extend their lethal capabilities beyond the reach of their arms. Others are killers and sociopaths, made even deadlier by a sprinkling of theology and discipline.

To view a full Flash Preview of this product, click on a page corner below.

Content: 5 Layout: 4 The Hollowpoint Monk is a decently ballanced adv class that is not as overpowered as some of the other Dept 7 classes. The options available to this class are interesting and go very well in a modern Hong Kong/ Jet Li styled actio [...]

These products were created by scanning an original printed edition. Most older books are in scanned image format because original digital layout files never existed or were no longer available from the publisher.

For PDF download editions, each page has been run through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to attempt to decipher the printed text. The result of this OCR process is placed invisibly behind the picture of each scanned page, to allow for text searching. However, any text in a given book set on a graphical background or in handwritten fonts would most likely not be picked up by the OCR software, and is therefore not searchable. Also, a few larger books may be resampled to fit into the system, and may not have this searchable text background.

For printed books, we have performed high-resolution scans of an original hardcopy of the book. We essentially digitally re-master the book. Unfortunately, the resulting quality of these books is not as high. It's the problem of making a copy of a copy. The text is fine for reading, but illustration work starts to run dark, pixellating and/or losing shades of grey. Moiré patterns may develop in photos. We mark clearly which print titles come from scanned image books so that you can make an informed purchase decision about the quality of what you will receive.

Original electronic format

These ebooks were created from the original electronic layout files, and therefore are fully text searchable. Also, their file size tends to be smaller than scanned image books. Most newer books are in the original electronic format. Both download and print editions of such books should be high quality.